Wikipedia: Resistance is Absent

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What happened was, I went to check out the new Microsoft search engine at
live.com (it’s not bad), and I started by
looking for myself. I was kind of surprised when my Wikipedia entry came in
ahead of ongoing. (Wikipedia’s #2 at Google and
Yahoo.)
I’m seeing this pattern of Wikipedia inching up the search-result charts for a
whole lot of things.
Search-result rank, on the Internet, more or less equals Authority. So this trend
has to worry the anti-Wikipedians. It worries me too. Maybe it could be
reversed, but I don’t think so.
[Update: Byron Saltysiak
suggests a more
positive aproach.]

There’s an old saying in business: if you want to get credit, the first
thing you have to do is show up. Let me rephrase that: if you want to have
authority on the Web, you have to show up on the Web. And those who ought to
enjoy more authority than Wikipedia aren’t.
Let me make the point by example.

Tonight’s Assignment ·
Let’s ask an interesting real-world question that real-world people might
ask: for each of the ten provinces of Canada, what is its population?
Let’s suppose you’re not a Canadian insider who knows that the Source Of All
Numbers is
Statistics Canada.
So, you could go to Wikipedia, which would be easy and quick. From East to
West you’d look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Edward_Island,
and, well, I’ll stop there, because the pattern is obvious. On each of those
pages you’ll find the population, along with a lot of other basic facts,
presented crisply and legibly, no further steps required.

But you know, that’s just the Wikipedia; some joker might have gone in and
changed the number by couple hundred thousand up or down, just for fun.
Wouldn’t you be better off going to a source with some real
authority?

I think you would. And that authority would be, in each case, the
provincial government.
Well, the good news is that they’re easy to find. Go to your favorite search
engine, type in “Government of Newfoundland” and you’re there in one
click.
Then the news gets bad; let’s go East to West.

British Columbia, my own province, is awful; the front page has lots
of cheesy photos of the Premier but no useful facts-and-figures pointers, I
spent a few minutes poking around and gave up.

The Right Answer ·
It’s
here, but good
luck finding it.
I found it because it was (very quietly, easy to miss) linked from the Ontario population page.

Horrible URIs ·
Cast your eyes back across those web addresses. What are your chances of
guessing them? Of remembering them? Of writing them down accurately? If you
bookmark them, how confident are you that they’ll be there after the next site
re-org?

The End ·
So if the public-sector community decided to standardize their URIs, or
adopt a principle that every front page should have a FAQ link, or make some sort
of concerted intelligent attempt to show up on the Web, they might grab some
authority back. But they’re not. And I don’t see any signs of interest.